54. On the Origin of Tuned Pipes Music Theory and Language -- part 2

I have made, elsewhere, the argument that musical "tonemes" can be regarded as closely equivalent to linguistic "phonemes." The tonemes are already, by theoreticians, called "pitch classes," and the phonemes could, via a very precise analogy, be called "vocable classes." (See my paper, "A Field Theory of Music Semiosis," in Eunomios -- http://www.eunomios.org/contrib/grauer1/grauer1.html .) Semioticians refer to this "emic" level, which controls how we hear the basic elements prior to putting them together into meaningful words, as "second articulation." What is truly remarkable is that both music and language (and its derivatives, such as various types of writing) seem to be the only types of communication/expression having second articulation. Paintings don't have it, photographs don't have it, motion pictures don't have it, etc. It is also of great interest that language also has first articulation, i.e., the ability to articulate "morphemes," such as words, that carry denotative meaning -- and music does not.

This suggests to me that music may have been prior to language, a necessary step in its development, by means of which a basic refining process, from the raw acoustics of the "etic" to the refined, culturally conditioned tonemes and phonemes of the "emic," took place. And the development of tuned pipes shows all the signs of a passage from the "etic" to the "emic" of precisely this kind. Once humans began making sounds perceivable as discreet pitches, that could have been the beginning of an emic awareness that could have led to language and all the many other elements of culture, from kinship systems to mathematics. The beginnings of music in the hocketed interplay of newly discovered "tonemes" could have served as a kind of laboratory in which second articulation was experimented with and refined.

There is more -- because, as I argued in an earlier post, tuned pipes also represent a system of music notation, which is already a kind of language. When a single pipe is understood as standing for a particular toneme, it is functioning as a signifier, with the toneme as its signified, in which case we have a complete sign system, if not a fully functional, syntactially organized language. But there again, music, which has been described as the syntactic art par excellence, might have had much to contribute in that realm as well.

So, according to my myth, or my hypothesis, as you prefer, what was invented when the "Yellow Bell" was first created was not only tuned pipes, and the theory of their tuning, but, at the same magical moment, enough of what was to become language as was necessary to produce such a theory.

(I NEVER said this was going to be easy.) :-)